Many current products and services can be customized by a user/customer before being purchased. For example, computer systems typically include many possible options and configurations that can be specifically selected or configured by the customer. Other examples of highly configurable products and services include telephone switching systems, airplanes, automobiles, mobile telephone services, insurance policies, and computer software.
Product and service providers typically provide a “product configurator” that allows a customer or sales engineer to interact with a computer in order to customize and configure a solution by selecting among optional choices. Some known product configurators are constraint based. For these configurators, constraints are enforced between optional choices, allowing the user to select the choices they want, while validating that the resulting set of user choices is valid.
In addition to configuring a product through user choices/selections, in some instances the product configurator itself automatically makes configuration selections. For example, as the result of certain user selections, an additional selection can be inferred based on the user selection and the subsequent enforcement of product constraints. Further, default decisions and decisions in response to an “auto-completion” mode are automatically made by some known configurators. Default and auto-completion decisions are typically arbitrary or heuristically guided decisions that can be used to complete a configuration solution without requiring a user to make all of the choices.